Military recruiters to Portland students: Don’t tell, we’ll ask

Maine public school students who fail to return a permission slip signed by their parent or guardian cannot go on a field trip, but they can be recruited to take a trip overseas and fight in the field of battle. Does that sound like a responsible policy to you?

On Tuesday night, the Portland Board of Education briefly addressed this policy and decided it makes perfect sense. At issue was the form high school students are given at the start of the school year that gives them the option not to be contacted by military or college recruiters. Actually, scratch that — the students themselves cannot make this decision; only their parent or guardian can decide not to provide this contact information.

The form is one slip of paper in a sizable stack of information sheets students are handed every September. Not surprisingly, it’s usually ignored by parents and students who are already overwhelmed during the hectic first days of school. In Portland, when administrators looked into this a decade ago, they found that fewer than 3 percent of students returned the so-called “opt-out” form.

In 2005, back when Portland’s school board had a few members with the fortitude to question authority, those members successfully changed the policy by putting the opt-out option on the emergency-contact-information card that students are required to submit every September. The results were remarkable. At Deering High School, over half of the juniors and seniors opted not to be called by Uncle Sam. At Portland High, about 65 percent opted out.

Since then, there’s been a lot of turnover in the district’s administration and on the school board. The progressives on the board, all of whom were aligned with the pro-peace Green Independent Party, either lost their seats or moved away. And at some point, for reasons no one can either remember or explain, the opt-out option was taken off the contact-info card and again became just another form to ignore.

Earlier this year, one of the two relatively new Greens on the board, Anna Trevorrow, revisited this matter. As her predecessors had discovered, federal law prohibits school districts from adopting an “opt-in” policy, whereby students who do not return the form do not have their contact information shared with recruiters. So the reform she proposed was basically the same solution the board adopted 10 years ago: include the opt-out option on the mandatory contact-information form.

On Tuesday night, the board voted unanimously (with one abstention, Green member Holly Seeliger) not to reinstitute that common-sense policy. The main reason: money.

It turns out that the district’s enlightened administrators have outsourced the maintenance of students’ contact information to a for-profit company based in Minnesota, Infinite Campus, that also sold the district expensive software to manage students’ assignments and grades. The company told administrators that it could add two fields to the contact-info database to indicate whether students consented to be called by college or military recruiters, but it would probably take 10 hours to make that adjustment, for which they would bill the school district $200 per hour.

Rather than question the patent insanity of this whole situation, board members agreed that a one-time expense of two grand was too much to ensure that students make a conscious decision regarding efforts to recruit them into the military during the ongoing Global War on Terror. It’s a good thing our soldiers aren’t as spineless and clueless as the Portland school board. Otherwise I’d be writing this in Russian.

This isn’t about whether military service is good or bad. It’s about ensuring that students make informed choices about their future, which is central to the mission of our public schools.

Both students and the military would be better served by a system in which only those teens who express interest in a career with the armed forces are called at home by recruiters. That would make the recruiters’ job much easier and more efficient, and would do much to prevent impressionable boys and girls from feeling pressured into joining the military — a decision too many recruits later realize they were not prepared to make.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, 22 veterans take their own lives every single day (a staggering statistic that is almost certainly much higher, given the limited reporting of such suicides). How much is it worth to you to help make sure that only those young people mentally prepared for war sign up for it? If the school board had to raise your property tax bill by a fraction of a cent to pay for this minor change, would you, like the current board, consider that too high a price?

Chris Busby

About Chris Busby

Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard, a monthly magazine about Portland. He writes a weekly column for the BDN.